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Arlington Industries offers a wide range of countertop, floor and wall
box kits, with plastic or metal covers in up to five different colors
featuring either metal or plastic flip lids and plugs for new or
retrofit construction.

To address the retrofit or remodel market
in particular, Arlington also offers an electrical box extender that
can be used to correct setbacks and insulate devices with an easy
install design, eliminating the need to align device screws with
extender holes.

Don’t look now, but your electrical outlets may one day soon start developing some smarts.

Smarts,
that is, in terms of artificial intelligence through which an outlet
box can “learn” to differentiate between a fuse-flipping arc event such
as faulty wiring and a “nuisance trip” such as when a vacuum cleaner or
hair dryer momentarily overloads a circuit.

Solar energy has grown from a niche player in the electricity-generation
market to a significant contributor to U.S. energy markets. Aiding that
growth have been notable equipment improvements, including more
efficient photovoltaic (PV) panels and the introduction of smart
inverters enabling safer and more productive operation of installed PV
systems. But some contractors might not yet realize that even the most
basic connectors and other fittings also have become optimized for the
harsh conditions they can face in solar applications.

If you could go back a decade or so, you’d find the growing data center
market then under fire for its notoriously high energy demand. Operators
based their siting decisions on locations offering easy access to
inexpensive electricity, with energy cost being the primary motivator.
Today’s owners, however, are equally concerned about the environmental
impact of that energy’s generation, which is helping to drive efficiency
improvements in data center design.

A new report released by Honeywell Industrial Cyber Security Solutions
and Services warns that a big threat to industrial process controls can
come in very small packages — namely, removable USB devices and flash
drives used to transfer data between and among computers.

For the last 20 years, behind the scenes, the Industry Data Exchange
Association (IDEA) has been working to develop and improve the way
electrical contractors and distributors find the electrical product and
pricing information they need for bidding and other purposes. Long
called the Industry Data Warehouse (IDW), the product database IDEA
manages, was recently rechristened IDEA Connector, in a move IDEA says
more clearly communicates the database’s intent.